A Literary Magazine

Archive for the ‘Fiction’ Category

By Kimberly Lundstrom

The autumn sun shone brilliant on the still-wet leaves, flashing orange and gold against rain-slicked trunks. Crow perched on the uppermost branch of a swaying hemlock and surveyed the beauty below. He called out a greeting to a couple of relations as they winged past, and received their replies with a bobbing head. Life was good.

By Jed Wyman

On the first full blazing-blue sky day of spring you stop by her office at the university’s Humanities Center, where, as well as teaching writing at the local community college in the neighboring town—where you also teach—she works as a secretary. The Humanities Center, its red brick exterior fringed with ivy, you call Hotel Charlie, a holdover from the phonetic alphabet you use when talking on the radio during your

By Joseph Mills

He’s here because Lily asked him to come. Just as he goes to the plays, the recitals, the “holiday” pageants that are really Christmas shows with one or two Hanukah songs, the gymnastics “meets” where kid do “routines” which consist of rolling around on the mats for a few minutes and then lining up for photographs which are available for purchase at twenty bucks a print. He has three or four of them, plus the ones he gets at

By Rajeev Prasad

Based on the movement of stars and planets in the galactic realm, the Hindu priest had set their mother’s death anniversary for tomorrow at the Livermore temple just east of San Francisco. The three sisters were all spending the weekend at Tej’s house. The last time the siblings had been together, they’d watched their mother dissolving under white sheets and morphine infusions.

By Wayne Cresser

A week and a half ago, this place had been a hub, a veritable mart of commerce, a rainbow soap bubble of bargain-hunting consumers. Now in the post-Christmas void of aisle after desolate aisle, out of whatever ambience the house sound system was chasing—old hit parade stuff, “one toke over the line, Sweet Jesus,” or “Proud Mary keep on turning, churning, burning”—one of those, I could hear him coming before I ever saw him.